Judge grants E. Jean Carroll’s request to amend $10 million complaint against Trump after CNN town hall remarks

A federal judge Tuesday granted writer E. Jean Carroll’s request to amend her original defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump to include comments he made about her in a CNN town hall last month.

The order from Judge Lewis Kaplan in U.S. District Court in Manhattan is a blow to Trump, who had asked the court to deny Carroll’s effort to update her lawsuit, which now seeks at least $10 million in damages.

The judge’s decision was made public shortly after Trump pleaded not guilty to federal criminal charges during a historic arraignment in Miami.

“We look forward to moving ahead expeditiously on E. Jean Carroll’s remaining claims,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, said in a statement to CNBC following the latest order Tuesday afternoon.

Alina Habba, an attorney for Trump, said in a statement to NBC News, “We maintain that she should not be permitted to retroactively change her legal theory, at the eleventh hour, to avoid the consequences of an adverse finding against her.”

Carroll sought to amend her lawsuit shortly after Trump unloaded a barrage of disparaging remarks about her during a live town hall on CNN on May 10.

“What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes, you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room, OK?” Trump said during that event. “I swear on my children, which I never do, I have no idea who this woman is. This is a fake story, made-up story.”

That much-criticized town hall came one day after a jury in a separate civil case found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation against Carroll and ordered him to pay her $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

The writer has accused the former president of raping her in a department store in the mid-1990s and then defaming her after she came forward with her allegations in 2019. She filed a civil defamation lawsuit against him in 2019, and then filed a second civil lawsuit against him in 2022 that also included a charge of battery.

Less than two weeks after the CNN town hall, Carroll’s lawyers asked Judge Kaplan to let her amend her original civil complaint to include Trump’s most recent comments, arguing that “the facts and circumstances have changed.”

Trump has denied raping Carroll. He has moved to appeal the verdict in Carroll’s second case.